The 2022 Conference on Advances in Communications, Devices and Systems (ACDS), organised annually by the Imperial College London IEEE Student Branch, in coordination with the departmental PhD representatives, was held on the 5th of September 2022.
The aim of the event was to bring together the Imperial community, to share outstanding research across different departments, and to offer opportunities for new connections and collaborations.
According to our records, the event was attended by 44 guests, including 25 IEEE members and 19 non-members.
Keynote speech
The first session of the day was the keynote presentation. We were delighted to welcome Dr Muhannad Alomari, who is the European AI Hub Lead at Rolls-Royce and Honorary Researcher at two leading Universities in London. He spoke about the role of AI in mission critical applications and how AI is used in Rolls-Royce, including successes and failures. Dr Alomari advocated for using AI for good, for example using text recommendations to help MND patients to communicate (see here) and gave insights into his own journey into AI and professional life. The talk attracted a lot of attention from students and academic staff, including senior lecturers and one Professor.
IEEE Local Student Paper Contest
The main event for students at the conference was the IEEE Local Student Paper Contest (SPC), exclusively open to students at Imperial College to provide them a platform to share their work and a chance to compete at the IEEE R8 SPC. Five paper submissions were chosen as finalists and the corresponding authors presented to a wide and highly-engaged audience of their peers and Imperial College academics.
These highly-driven students presented their excellent research in a hybrid format as, unfortunately, some could not attend in-person. Nonetheless, all presentations were held at an exceptionally high standards, giving the SPC judges difficulties in picking the winners. At the end, the judges and conference organisers were happy to announce the following results:
1st place: Wenqiang Lai KDE-SSI: Knowledge Distilled Ensemble Model for sEMG-based Silent Speech Interface (paper to be submitted to IEEE R8 SPC)
2nd place: Jakub Lala Coarse-Graining of Molecular Dynamics Using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (paper to be submitted to IEEE R8 SPC)
3rd place: Raphael Bijaoui Decentralised and Privacy-Preserving Node Classification on Graph Neural Networks
PhD research presentations
The final session was reserved for doctoral researchers from the EEE and Materials Departments to present their innovative work. The presentations covered very diverse topics, namely: multi-agent simulations of social influence in group decision-making, ultralow-cost multispectral spectrometers
for materials analysis, secure quantum communication, and effects of COVID-19 on the home behaviours of people affected by dementia. The audience evaluated the presentations based on 5 aspects, and the following presenters were awarded for their excellent talks:
1st place: Saleh Komies Ultralow-cost multispectral spectrometer for materials analysis
2nd place: Asimina Mertzani The effect of social influence on aggregated decision making in socio-technical systems
3rd place: Alina-Irina Serban The effect of COVID-19 on the home behaviours of people affected by dementia
Networking opportunities
The conference provided opportunities for all students to make new connections within Imperial and outside. Attendees spoke and exchanged ideas during the social receptions on the day, where, most notably, students had a chance to interact with our keynote speaker Dr Alomari, the Head of the EEE Department at Imperial College London, and other IEEE members.
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